This is my personal website as well as the site where I place all of my conlang material when it is ready to be published. Previously this site consisted of a white page with the material posted directly on it, but now I have added sidebars to make it easier for other people to navigate. At present, the sidebars don't have that many links and some of them are redundant, but that should change soon.

The Great Sleep

These languages are spoken on planet Teppala, a planet that is much like Earth but has historically been much colder. Because of the cold, most life remained concentrated in the oceans for a long time and although vertebrates evolved in the ocean in much the same way as they did on Earth, it was not until the planet entered a prolonged period of warmth that they were able to settle the land. By this time, they had already evolved advanced intelligence and a rudimentary instinctive language called Standard Animal. These first land vertebrates, called kanuki or tetrapods, soon transformed the echolocation-based Standard Animal into a spoken language with thirty phonemes and transferred the knowledge of this language to all of their evolutionary descendants.

On Tebbala's one relatively warm continent, called Gitaipanu, the tetrapods evolved into dinosaur-like creatures and became more intelligent. One species of dinosaur, called the yani or anatosaur, evolved a supreme level of intelligence and developed their own languages unintelligible with Standard Animal. They took over the continent of Gitaipanu and developed advanced civilization but the environment was too harsh to allow their population to ever grow beyond a million or so.

On another continent, Pilulla, the climate was in most places much colder and the tetrapods developed into birdlike creatures called mimba. One species of mimba in particular developed a variety of physical abilities that helped them create and sustain a series of civilizations centered around the barren coastal tundra of the north coast of Pilulla. This species was called the cilai or kasaci. The cilai were unusual in that they had a very lengthened childhood stage, and that it was in this stage of life that they were the strongest and most agile.

While birds were evolving in the tundra, mammals evolved on the other side of Pilulla and after many millions of years humans developed. Like the Yani but unlike the Cilai, human language split off from Standard Animal and entered an advanced evolutionary track that allowed its speakers to express concepts not available in Standard Animal. A standard human language called Andanese developed, but as humans began to explore the other parts of Pilulla, they became disconnected from the Andanese living along the beaches and many of them developed their own languages. Soon evolutionary mutations that erased the instinctual ability to understand Standard Animal from birth began to spread through the human race, and before long only the Andanese who had remained on the beaches retained this primeval ability.

As humans pushed their way northward through Pilulla, they began to come within the ranges of the civilizations of the birds. The humans wanted to live along the coast, where food was more plentiful and the climate was warmer, but the birds had already settled all of this land. Since humans and birds did not share a common language, cohabitation was difficult. Eventually a sort of pidgin language developed, and humans and birds did come to live together in symbiotic societies. Generally the humans did work and the birds provided military protection. There were many other species in their cities as well, performing other roles. All of the animals, including humans, were used to provide food for the other animals, but only after they had died a natural death. Overall the humans benefited from the birds and other animals even though they were highly restricted in their freedom. The earliest stage of bird-human cohabitation was called the Eled society, and it began to spread slowly along the coast of Pilulla as the centuries passed, and then began to spread onto islands. Some humans broke free of the control of the birds by fleeing into inland tundra too cold and barren for the birds to survive in, even though the humans themselves were struggling to survive there. Those who had seceded became known as lavets and their culture was called the Moonshine culture. Those who remained with the birds were called pabaps. Most pabaps belonged to the mainland Bloppabop culture; the islands had their own microcultures.

Eventually the societies began to decline, as a result of changing climate, increased human rebelliousness, and the introduction of a livestock animal superior to humans to the societies of the birds living in warmer climates. This animal, called the malhala, was restricted to warm climates and could not survive in the habitats where the cilai birds were most comfortable, but nonetheless those cilai who moved south and began raising malhala benefitted not only from the increased per capita calorie consumption, but also from the alliance of the ever-stronger human societies who had introduced the malhala to them in the first place. So the birds began to abandon the tundra, and those few who stayed were too weak to continue to control the local humans, and the local humans reversed the structure of society and placed themselves on top. Within a few hundred years Bloppabop humans controlled virtually all of those parts of Pilulla that had for millions of years been the domain of the cilai, and the cilai were now living a difficult life in a dangerously warm habitat which itself was not free of the danger of human aggression. The birds began to die out in the warmer climates as humans hunted them to extinction, but they remained in their original habitats where the dominant humans had an interest in their preservation, as they were now the hunters and chief means of law enforcement of these human societies.

Additionally, there was one tribe of humans that set itself apart from the Bloppabops because of physical and cultural differences. Having originated as a livestock breed of humans, the Palli people were much taller and stronger than the Bloppabops, and had until now been confined to Palli island because the birds were afraid that if they were introduced to the mainland they would revolt and exterminate the birds. Now that the Palli were free, they began to explore the mainland, and decided to settle in the ruined city of Ukieipi, which had been the center of the birds' symbiotic civilization. From here they began to spread out all over the continent at a pace much more rapid than the original wave of human settlement had had. Over the course of about 10000 years, the Pallians assimilated the aboriginal human peoples, including the Andanese, and in many cases bred with them. Pure aboriginals survived in most places, especially the south, because they still retained the ability to speak Standard Animal and that was something that the Pallians could not do.